La reina lolita

Male announcers mock young women for taking selfies during a baseball game 

Each week, part of my chaplaincy training is to write a reflection on how it’s going. Here’s week number three. Some identities may be altered for privacy. All the writings are here.

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When they wheeled him in, the doctors said it was already too late. They put him on an iron lung, and the only thing left to do was let his mother decide on his organs.

He was almost twenty years old, good-looking, tall and strapping, face beat up from meth. His mother had given him countless chances and a free bed, but he relapsed every time, back to the muse and to back alley corners and then crawling home again — and his mom finally kicked him out. Shortly after, he was hit by a car. He probably didn’t see it coming. The driver probably didn’t see him, either.

Someone called for an ambulance and left him there.

The only thing the hospital could do was stuff him full of tubes to keep him breathing. There was no brain activity. His head was held by a neck brace the size of an oven; his bed was a mess of angry plastic tentacles, sprouting and twisting in veiny stubborn circles. I could still tell that underneath all that life support, he was a handsome kid.

In the waiting room, his mom kept blaming herself. “Just one more time, I could’ve let him stay. He wasn’t getting better, I mean what could I do? I couldn’t do it anymore, his eyes were just gone, he was already gone. But I could’ve one more time.”

We brought her up to ICU. She saw her son and folded in half. I had to look away. It was too much to bear, to see the love of a mother who had to say goodbye to her child, and not even really. She stroked his chest, rising with the tide of the respirator; she wept over his tubes and his arms and his face; she finally grabbed at his shirt and kept saying, Sorry, I’m sorry, I would one more time, I would. It had ended so badly. They had said terrible words. She thought she was doing the right thing. How could she know? She loved him enough to set him free, but only love could hurt this much.

I was back and forth in the ICU all day. The mother was still there each time, sometimes crying, sometimes staring at the wall.

The rest of the family trickled in. We sat them down to go over the body-release and cremation. I hated this part. The form asked, “Was he in college? Was he working? Was he in the military?” The mother replied softly: No, no, no. She fell more and more into the seat and her look just killed me. She had wished for something better, every dream she had prayed over her womb to every extended hand for a prodigal son come home, and every part of me wanted to scream her son awake and reach back to one-more-time and mend these shards somehow, but I had seen into the irrevocable darkness that life is unfair and time is relentless and pain is the price you must pay to love so deeply, and still, we have to try anyway, and love anyway, and dream anyway, to the best we know how, whether things will or won’t work out, and we learn to make something of the pieces.

After eleven hours, the mother finally decided.

“Unplug it. Use every organ. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

The family, one by one, said their goodbyes. We prayed. We prayed for the family to have room to grieve, to weep, to let go of blame. We prayed for the organs to be used wisely, that it might be a small hint of good in the middle of so much hurt. We prayed for God’s mercy to receive a soul who had never known peace in this life, but would know it now. We prayed that he would finally be set free.

I told him I was sorry. I said goodbye. I wish I could have one more time.

The man on the far left is Oberleutnant Hans von Pommen, the commander of the unit. In the last month of the Battle of Verdun he was stabbed 18 times, shot twice by French snipers and stepped on a land mine. The land mine was the hardest thing for him to recover from, but he eventually grew back his missing legs.

Third from the right is Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, who single-handedly (ie both by himself, and with only one arm) stopped a charge of Mk V Females on the Somme.

“Coming back is like waking up from a deep sleep, a sleep that fills you like quicksand. When you wake up it’s like breaking the surface of a scummy pond. I’ve never felt as energized or strong as after I’ve come back.”– Oberleutenant Hans von Pommern, Belgium 1914

“I feel good. I feel fine. After a few times you don’t even notice the pain anymore.” – Gefreiter Georg Steinbrenner, after having his spine broken in three places and one arm severed by a shell impact. France 1916.

“We don’t need weapons anymore! We don’t need tools of any sort, we are invincible, we’re fucking gods on Earth!”– Unteroffizier Wilhelm Eichelberger, France 1915

“How did I do it? Focus, that’s all. Focus is really all you need.”– Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, on how he knocked out four Mark V Females with nothing but a sharpened shovel and grenades

“I can’t do this anymore, please don’t wake me up I’m not going back I’M NOT!”– unidentified Immortal, German aid station, 1917. The words were recorded in the war diaries of Hauptmann Friedrich Ritter von Sternberg, the attending surgeon, who later wrote that “such plaintive screams, coming from a man whose entire face was a wet and bloody pulp, cut me to my very core”